You may notice some formatting
changes this month; someone yelled rotate and we all switched
desks. This month marks the return of Voodoo, our answer to
Karma and a numerical approximation of just how black your magic truly
is. Here's a breakdown of the new scheme:

The story percentage is
the fraction of comments in the story which are nested under the
linked comment. If you managed to Parent 50% of the discussion in the
story, you'll see 50% here, and your Voodoo score will reflect
this. Voodoo is also influenced by the +awards section, which we
decline to further elaborate on. Our system for measuring Voodoo must
not fall into the hands of crack reverse engineers such as Jamie
McCarthy (played brilliantly by Ben Affleck) so for deciphering this
section, you're on your own. Suffice it to say that every factor
available is taken into account.Note: Voodoo is calculated from a
browser-cached version of the page, not by scripted interaction with
the site. That means that late replies may be missed by our scoring
system. Complaints? Let us know what you think of the new
system by voting
in our poll.

Flamewar 9/11

As we noted in last month's issue, class C
subnet bans are in effect for anyone whose posts consist of "Bad
Behavior". What is "Bad Behavior"? Well according to pudge, anyone who
asks is a "doo doo
head" [sic]. Trollback decided to fact check pudge's assertion:

Unsurprisingly,
pudge has no idea what he's talking about. So what exactly is
"Bad Behavior" on Slashdot? Turns out, "Bad Behavior" means, among
other things, being a Republican, not entirely trusting Michael Moore,
or asserting that self-described Op-Eds are Op-Eds. This is made
abundantly clear in the most deliberate (and successful) troll of the
month.

CmdrTaco decided that this month, "News for Nerds" included reviewing
a highly charged political movie and noting that it "speaks much
truth", on the front page. This is the guy who won't post stories on
Slashdot about Slashdot because it's not "News for
Nerds". This 3200+ comment flamefest generated all the histrionics
you'd expect, with one interesting caveat: anyone who questioned
Moore's impartiality was moderated Troll, and thereby subnet banned
from the site. This is, in a nutshell, the very definition of
"Bad Behavior" - disagreeing with CmdrTaco's politics. To quote from
their beloved FAQ:

"The Slashdot
Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using
them."

Now click on the
F911 story. You will basically only be reading Republican points
of view now; these are the only people who got moderated down. In a
story which was basically an open invitation to political discussion,
with a highly polarized electorate, the political faction that agreed
with the editors was moderated up, while the political faction that
disagreed, no
matter how calmly presented, was moderated Troll/Flamebait
and banned from posting to the site. And moderation is anonymous, so
we'll never know who did it.

Now and then trollback gets email
from people who don't understand why we publish our magazine. We
don't want to come down on either side of the F-911 debate
(except perhaps to say that we consider Mr. Moore living proof that
you can troll for a living) but we do think that trying to use
Perl to silence your political opposition might not be Fair &
Balanced. Blatant flamebait posted as a story? Your political
opposition moderated out of sight and IP blocked from posting? And
remember, it's not
censorship!Vive le resistance!

Bonch got his review
of Spiderman 2
posted to the front page of Slashdot, the only comment being "Thanks
to bonch for this review". Sadly no one remembered to thank Google for
not being consulted, as this review had been written and posted the
day before at Chud.com. As legions
of Slashbots
began to moan about the plagiarism, the story stayed unedited on the
front page until it reached the very bottom, at which point a
retraction was posted. Bonch wins Trollback's Bayesian Filter Food
Award this month, proving once again what an effective
anti-trolling tool a Bayes filter would be.

I can watch ICANNWATCH

Near and dear to our hearts is
ICANNWATCH, a Slash-based site devoted to meticulously monitoring
ICANN for signs of abuse. Now, we love an Internet crank as much as
anybody, but unlike Slashdot, we're pretty sure that ICANN's ethics
are unassailable. Nevertheless, it seems they've got a problem over
there with something called "Anonymous Posting". Switch
to -1 Nested to see some of the best...

Sheetrock 2 Reviewed

Yes it's true, Sheetrock is
back. Posting from behind enemy subnet lines, you'll note he found
a way to keep his powder dry and make an appearance in this month's
List.

What I'd like to know is, what kind of tactical advantage does a railgun bring? Sure, it can hit a target some 200+ miles out, but so can a missile. Missiles also have the advantage of being self-guided. All this thing is, is a way to build a more powerful battleship. And yet, the U.S. has put all of its Battleships on active reserve. In their place, they've been deploying missile carriers at a lower cost and higher degree of flexibility.In short, what does the railgun bring to a Real [cont]...

A key benefit of the e-Plate is that the tag provides an encrypted and secure ID code which is registered in the UK Ministry of Transport's vehicle database. This code prevents tampering, cloning, or other forms of fraud that can currently happen with camera-based systems. Additionally, the e-Plate is designed to shatter if anyone tries to remove or otherwise tamper with it, and the tag can be programmed to transmit a warning if any attempt is made to dislodge the plate. They said tha [cont]...

159|(5,29,73,10%)Anonymous Coward | "This is another reason why C should be deprecated"

Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether or not to continue using C for serious programming projects. As I will explain, I feel that C needs to be retired, much the same way that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently asked to develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune 500 compan [cont]...

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.Why is this a good thing?If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed? [cont]...

While the iPos looks nice, and admittedly has the best interface of all the MP3 players (owing to the simple design Macintosh has become a master of), is it worth dropping a couple hundred on it? I've heard of two design flaws now -- both of which they seem less than inclined to fix beyond a short period of ownership -- and have noticed that PDAs in a similar price range can do MP3, video, and even word processing. If it was reliable I'd buy one tomorrow, but are they yet? [cont]...

Java Faster Than C++?No, it isn't. It's much slower.I wrote a program that simply counts to 10000 and then quits. Time from double-clicking the icon until when the program exits: C++: 0.5 secondsJava: 20 seconds How hard is that?

...is to hire a good lawyer. Hint: a lawyer who advises you to settle when you have done nothing wrong is not a good lawyer. Most lawyers are too lazy to take cases that they do not understand, which explains why so many tech-related cases wind up costing the protagonist money. This is even worse in the criminal law arena, because these lazy attorneys can cost an innocent man his freedom. IMHO there is no excuse for this, but it happens every day. Case in point: my roommate [cont]...

My reading of the bill is that the law would not overturn Betamax so much as explicitly prevent Betamax from being applied to digital media. Betamax and VHS were both analog formats with cumulative degradation, that is, a copy of a copy was degraded, and at enough generations the quality would be unusable. Perfect digital copies, however, do not have this limitation, and it is merely common sense that they should be covered by a different law. Betamax was a Supreme Court decision, and [cont]...

Despite the first amendment, there are restrictions on what you can say in America. Now, I understand that this bill is not worded as well as it could have been. A sensible restriction would be self-classification of pornographers into a.XXX TLD, with jail time and other punishments only for those who attempt to sneak into.COM and others. This would allow respectable ISPs such as AOL to block all pornographers simply by blocking [cont]...

Faster importantless? With 64 bit processing power for all available by athlon 64 made available that works with 64 bit yes immdiately we would switch. These chip make futiliity. Why make processors of like these new when you can improve on 64 bit? The battle is to will be lost to Athlon without 64 bit competition by.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=architect : 1. One who designs and supervises the construction of buildings or other large structures.2. One that plans or devises: a country considered to be the chief architect of war in the Middle East.I mean, it's not even a second meaning. It's just plain English abuse. I hope this Zdziarski guy's paper is decent, since he's pretty tripped my spam filter from the gate.

The passing lane is for passing, and the law of the passing lane is this: Slower Traffic Always Yields To Overtaking Traffic. She couldn't pass you, because overtaking on the right is illegal. By blocking the passing lane, you've gone ahead and blocked the entire freeway to anyone who obeys the law.You were in the wrong, she did the right thing. If it were me, I'd have shot you.FYI.

I am for cannot waiting able frequency to this have! I too am so greatness compression going to get. I am ask: can use this games? UT2k4 is good. It is very big game however maybe some for people. Can this technology fast enough for gaming be?

This brings up a complaint I've got with the way the industry works nowadays.

As a programmer, I feel the continual march of progress in computing has beenhampered as of late because of a major misconception in some segments of thesoftware industry. Some would argue that the process of refinement byiterative design, which is the subject of many texts in the field -- extremeprogramming being the most recent -- demonstrates that applying the theory ofevolution to coding is the most ef [cont]...

BMW parts are much harder to fence, as car thieves steal cars for their parts, and the market is entirely an economy of scale. The more popular a car, the more the car is worth. Which is why BMW has never made the most stolen car list [cnn.com]. The parts to a Honda Accord, for instance, are worth a lot more and are easier to sell.Of course, stealing an iPod from a BMW doesn't mean you have to steal the whole car, just smash the window. This will be a huge boon to radio thieves, as the [cont]...

I wonder if they have plans to move this into other, higher quality vehicles in the future? While I admit that BMW's are very expensive and prestigous, independent car reviews like Consumer Reports always give them the lowest possible marks for reliability, a key indicator of quality. Any chance they're going to port this to high quality makes such as Nissan, Honda or (the king of reliability) Toyota?Before anyone flames me -1 Troll or something, here's a link [consumerreports.org] to [cont]...

Steve Wozniack's son and I got in a fight at a Jack-In-The-Box in Los Gatos, California last year. He told me to go back to Iraq (I have brown skin color).I would have kicked the shit out of him but he had a bunch of his buddies from Los Gatos High there and I only had a couple friends with me. The cops showed up really soon so it was all over anyway.

8AC, Awards:+4acct+4mod

OSnews: Hotbed of Agreement

OSnews, a highly moderated
forum, is pretty much troll-proof. We think. On the other hand, there
might be some exceptions. An alert reader has sent in the following
links:

We don't want to come down on either side of the F-911 debate (except perhaps to say that we consider Mr. Moore living proof that you can troll for a living) but we do think that trying to use Perl to silence your political opposition might not be Fair & Balanced.

BWAAAHAHAHAHA! This is the best sentence I've read in months! BRAVO TROLLBACK!

I think the new format is great. It saves me from clicking on every troll.

As for "bad behaviour", Republicans, F911, and Pudge, you might want to check out Pudge's journal. Especially note the most recent one which touches on all these topics and contains an extended thread where he and Jamie go at it. This happens every few months and each time Jamie comes out looking like a fool in my eyes. You might even consider Jamie for your next Trollback, but I doubt that JE posts qualify.